Virgin Media 2012 1st Quarter Results: 677,000 TiVo subscriptions, 18% of Virgin's TV Customer base

The 1st quarter results of 2012 are in for Virgin Media, and the TiVoizlation of the Digital Cable Network continues, with 677,000 subscriptions to TiVo, up by 242,000 from the previous quarter. 18% of Virgin's TV customer base now has TiVo, and that number will only increase thanks to  the new Collections packs which all feature TiVo.

Not surprisingly, Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett was pleased with the results, and the impact TiVo has had on them:

Virgin Media TiVo is driving more consumption of PayTV programming. TiVo customers are 23% more likely to watch a PayTV suggestion than a free TV suggestion. Suggesting that TiVo is unlocking content discovery.

The other great thing about Virgin Media TiVo is it’s dedicated, over-the-top connection, allowing our customers access to content and applications outside of our TV world garden. Unlike in a DSL garden, the bandwidth this connection uses will not impede the bandwidth other devices are using at the same time.

Virgin Media TiVo is a superior differentiated product and our customers are loving the features. The key customer satisfaction ratings, which we measure through promoter score, or MPS, are 24% higher than the non-TiVo customers. That’s our critical mass. This is why we’re offering TiVo as standard in our new collections. It’s the future of TV being delivered now and we will continue to improve and enhance service.

....TiVo continues to sell very strongly. We had 242,000 net adds in the quarter. This is despite a price increase from £3 to £5 at the end of February. Remember, we’ve only been advertising this service for three quarters now and we have already penetrated 18% of our entire TV base. Over 40% of TiVo gross adds in the quarter were new to Virgin Media TV.

New YouTube app is all about you on Virgin Media's TiVo

There's been a lot of new apps appearing on the Virgin Media TiVo platform recently. Most of these have been promotional apps for mobile phones and certain TV channels/content (sorry, no Lovefilm or Netflix yet). But one of the new apps (or rather, an update of an existing one) has been for YouTube.

The new app is much improved over the old versions and finally allows you to login to your YouTube account (which is far easier than you'll expect) and view your subscriptions and playlists, subject of course, to content restrictions.

There's room for improvement here. For instance, you can't watch content which you'll flagged as 'watch later', and the subscriptions content is all in one list, and isn't divided into a folder per channel. Still, this is a massive improvement on previous versions of the app, and from my (very limited) testing, the video quality is at least on a par with the Xbox 360 version of the app.

BBC Red Button finally arrives on Virgin Media's TiVo

From the Help and Support Forums:

We're very happy to announce that BBC Red Button is now available to Virgin Media TiVo customers. The features available include video news, full length text articles from the BBC News website and coverage of F1 season that is always up to date and available whenever you want to watch. Later this year the BBC Sport Red button services will be extended to cover other major events e.g. Euro 2012, Wimbledon and Olympics.

If you’re watching any BBC channel, just press the red button on your TiVo remote. Then arrow up or down to choose iPlayer or the News or Sports app, then select OK. Or you can select the BBC News or Sports app from the ‘Apps & Games’ section of your TiVo menu.

The new service is being rolled out to everyone over the next 24 hours, so don't worry if you can't see it yet.